TONY GAYNOR Four Courts Press €54 ISBN 9781801510370 Reviewed by Daniel Ayiotis I’ll start this review with my only criticism, to get it out of the way: the title of this book undersells it. When this nearly 400-page tome arrived in the post, I anticipated a chronological trudge through biographies of the 36 commanders who … Read more
Joe Culley @TheRealCulls Everything you know about the siege of Derry is wrong. For instance, it’s not entirely clear whether there were any apprentice boys at all. Yes, there were a handful of youths who initially shut the gates, some of whom might have been apprenticed at the time—but maybe not. They had, however, been … Read more
By Fiona Brennan Micheál Mac Liammóir, the co-founder of the Gate Theatre, was a steadfast advocate of the Irish amateur dramatic movement. Writing in Theatre of Ireland in 1950, he declared that amateur drama should not be ‘overlooked in the dramatic history [of Ireland]’ because it enabled those ‘players or public, isolated from life of … Read more
Museum of Literature Ireland, www.moli.ie By Donal Fallon This year marks the centenary of the birth not only of Brendan Behan but also of his contemporary and friend Anthony Cronin. In one of the most celebrated memoirs of twentieth-century Ireland, Dead as doornails, Cronin painted a vivid and often tragic picture of bohemian Dublin in … Read more
RTÉ1, 9 and 16 February 2023 By Sylvie Kleinman This deliberately unpretentious, occasionally rollicking yet robust and informative two-part documentary looks at the career and character of Lady Augusta Gregory (1852–1932), a leading figure in the Irish literary revival. A folklorist and Irish linguist who nurtured the talent of defining writers of the age—most notably … Read more